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> The onus is on the people presenting the result, in all cases. That's the scientific process. The authors need to defend the null hypothesis as vigorously as
by em500 6y ago
> The onus is on the people presenting the result, in all cases. That's the scientific process. The authors need to defend the null hypothesis as vigorously as you can.
The authors posit plausible evidence (observed variance across states with different introduction dates of laws, car ownership, going from 2 to 3 children) that car seat laws was a deterrent to having more than 2 children. A substantial criticism would be to come up with some possible confounders or alternative model of the variation. Saying that it might be caused by anything is a low effort dismissal.
> Have you ever gone through a peer review process? Seriously?
Yes I have, on both sides. Maybe it differs by field, but I (and my fellow PhD students) took it serious enough that we rarely read and finished writing a peer review within a single day. (This was mostly on economic theory / methodology papers, where even understanding the paper can take multiple days.)
- wegs 6y ago> Saying that it might be caused by anything is a low effort dismissal. I am dismissing it as: One paper = interesting hypothesis Multiple replicated papers = theory Multiple replicated papers, with substantially different methodologies = scientific fact > Yes I have, on both sides. Maybe it differs by field, but I (and my fellow PhD students) took it serious enough that we rarely read and finished writing a peer review within a single day. (This was mostly on economic theory / methodology papers, where even understanding the paper can take multiple days.) Interesting. I've worked in several fields, and if this is the case, economics is pretty special. Good on you! It wasn't always this way. As an economist, you study incentives. Think about how to prevent your field from sliding the way others did. Right now, academic incentive structures dictate cursory skim, and cultures+behaviors tend to (often after many years) align to incentives. As someone in a field (apparently) further along that path than economics, all I can suggest is to act sooner rather than later. It's easier to preserve cultures of integrity than to fix cultures of the opposite.
- em500 6y agoI left academics more than 10 years ago. Much easier to earn a good living in industry churning garbage "conversion uplifts" and "data driven insights" and occasionally sounding smart on internet forums with low effort posts than toiling for days/weeks on peer reviews or months/years on publishing. Lecture me again about incentives :)